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Nik Gervae's Page

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A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.See More

One man's religion is another man's mythology!! A group for comparative mythology/religion. Discover the origins of religions, and see just how similar they all are. They all have one thing in common - they rely on faith and belief!!See More

For people wanting to learn more about Joseph Campbell's writings."When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come." -- Joseph CampbellSee More

This once-active group is now unmoderated, and discussions / interest have declined to almost nothing. The original group founder is long gone.Active moderation is needed, therefore comments and membership are now closed.For re-birth of a vegetarian atheist group, if you are willing to moderate the group, I invite you to submit a new group. There have been some great discussions and I am grateful to have been involved. I am vegetarian and atheist, among other things, and would love to be in…See More

Not all of us are ex-Christians, Muslims, or Catholic. If you were once Wiccan, Pagan, Astaru or anything labeled under the Neo-pagan umbrella here is your chance to tell your story.Tell your stoires here about your experinces with neo-pagans.See More

Introductions

Hello! I'm new to this community so I'll take a bit of time to post an introduction.

I'm a queer pagan-ish atheist living in San Francisco and working as a software engineer at Apple. Well, I have lots of pagan friends anyhow; I'm still not sure I qualify for the P-word myself. I've always been fascinated by and enjoyed myth and fantasy, and exploring nonrational experience is a growing interest of mine, but in the end stories are stories and experiences, however esoteric or fantastic, have to be analyzed and integrated into daily life. Basically I'm using esoteric techniques from a purely psychological perspective. If you can get past the woo-woo (and that is often very difficult indeed), the practices themselves can be surprisingly rich. The nice thing about pagans is they're incredibly tolerant and open-minded, and a surprising number are secretly nor not-so-secretly atheists.

On the flip side, I've read nearly all of Ayn Rand's published works and a broad spectrum of science writing on psychology and evolution (Daniel Dennett is a particularly good writer). Ms. Rand was a big influence for a long time, for both good and bad, but in the end I got tired of dealing with both the cult of Objectivism and her knee-jerk opponents, and pretty much gave up on discussing her work critically with anybody. I don't spend much reading time on these topics any more, as I'm already convinced, and am more interested in practical self-development than general theory.

I look forward to meeting folks on this site, but I'll say in advance I don't go adding everybody I meet to my friends list. If we find ourselves chatting a lot or interacting in forums, then we can make a relationship formal. ;-)

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Hi Nik Gervae in California and welcome to this great meeting place
where religion is recognised for the superstition and populace-control fraud that it is and for its inexcusable oppression of women
--- and that God and gods are merely fictions inside human heads.